At the Hands of a Stranger. Lee Butcher

      PINNACLE BOOKS

       Kensington Publishing Corp.

       http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

      I would like to thank Barbara Taylor

      for helping keep me informed of new developments

      and reminding me of old ones.

      Thanks also to all of the law enforcement officers

      who helped, and many thanks to Bonnie Fruchey,

      who was my Friday.

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      Chapter 27

      Chapter 28

      Chapter 29

      Chapter 30

      Acknowledgments

      Photo credit

      UPDATE: At The Hands of a Stranger

      Chapter 1

      On New Year’s Day, 2008, the killer watched a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair as he waited for a chance to strike. It was a cold day on Blood Mountain in Georgia’s Vogel State Park; the temperature was just above freezing, in the crisp afternoon light. The woman was accompanied by a mixed-breed black dog, which seemed to be part Labrador retriever. His own dog was a red Irish setter named Dandy, and the canine had not had a bath or brushing in a long time.

      The killer had come to Blood Mountain two or three days before—he had lost track of time—because it was a good place to hunt women. He considered himself to be a professional soldier who was always on combat maneuvers; he used his training and keen powers of observation to scrutinize his surroundings in detail. He was always on high alert. The woman’s unleashed dog was of no concern to him, because he had been attacked by canines many times in the past. Usually, it was the other way around: He attacked dogs when he disapproved of their behavior. The dogs didn’t have a chance against him. Sometimes pepper spray would be enough to chase a dog off; but if one was determined, he always had his butcher knife, bayonet, and a collapsible police-style baton, which snapped into a yard-long club that could crush bone.

      “It’s easy to kill a dog,” he would say, even to strangers. He boasted that for a man with his fighting skills, it was also easy to kill a human being.

      Blood Mountain, about ninety miles northwest of Atlanta, was an ideal setting for the killer. It rises 4,458 feet into the air and is thick with trees and hiking trails so narrow that in some parts two hikers can’t walk side by side. There were still smudges of gold, brown, and red on the poplar, birch, oak, and maple trees—although the height of the color season had passed and most of the deciduous leaves were on the ground. During the peak of autumn, Blood Mountain trails were thick with hikers who wanted to walk among this splendid beauty.

      With the colorful foliage almost gone, there were fewer hikers than usual, but that suited the killer’s purpose. The less populated the trails, the better his chances were of not being seen by someone who could identify him later. He wasn’t famous yet, except in his own mind, but it seemed to him that he attracted attention like the Lone Ranger, who wore a skintight outfit, a fancy two-gun holster rig, and rode a palomino. That was all staging and show business designed to draw attention so that when people asked, “Who was that masked man?” everyone knew that it was the Lone Ranger. None of that shit for him. Once he drew attention to himself, and his picture was published in a newspaper, he was done for; and he had already been “screwed, blued, and tattooed” by society in every way imaginable.

      People invariably remembered him because of his brightly colored, expensive hiking clothes, a weird demeanor, scary appearance, and general attitude of menace.

      “I’m the fucking Lone Ranger,” he sometimes told people to describe the attention he generated.

      The killer was Gary Michael Hilton, a former paratrooper and career criminal, who had been hiking and running for years along the Appalachian Trail and in remote mountain forests of the Northwest region of the United States. Except for a two-year enlistment as a U.S. Army paratrooper, Hilton had been a drifter most of his life. He had chosen to become homeless about fourteen years earlier. At five feet ten inches tall and 160 pounds, Hilton was lean and strong, with whipcord muscles connecting tendons like steel cable beneath his weathered brown skin.

      Although only a fringe of gray hair formed a horseshoe on his head, he was tougher than a pine knot and could run through the mountains for hours and walk all day and all night toting a seventy-pound backpack. No one had better mess with him, and people seldom did because he looked mean. A former roommate had described Hilton as being “a sociopath with a mean streak.” He was insulted at first, but then he realized it was true—and he liked it. He was mean and he knew it. The unkempt gray goatee on Hilton’s face and lack of all but one jagged, brown front tooth accented his menacing appearance: when he smiled, there was only a black hole with the jagged tooth between his lips. Hilton had pulled most of his teeth out with a pair of pliers rather than get dental care. It was something else he bragged about. Hilton was also a sociopath—and he knew that, too. This self-awareness made him superior to other people who were also mean and sociopathic, but were unable to recognize it in themselves.

      He had told an acquaintance that he had no conscience and felt sorry for people who did, because having one made life too complicated.

      The woman he had decided to hunt today was Meredith Emerson, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of the University of Georgia, who was employed in an executive-training position by an Atlanta company that sold shipping boxes in bulk. An avid hiker and outdoorswoman, Emerson started to walk up a “feeder” trail with her dog frolicking around her, but she almost immediately met another couple coming from the other direction with their dog on a leash. They stopped and Hilton watched as they took turns petting the dogs and chatting. People with dogs were the easiest targets, he believed, because they were more likely to be approachable. All you had to do was start talking about what a good-looking dog they had—blah, blah, blah—and they became instant buddies. This was something he had learned during the forty years that he had been on perpetual combat control.

      Hilton’s money supply had dwindled to forty dollars. He figured he had to spend at least thirty dollars to put gasoline in his filthy, dilapidated 1996 Chevrolet Astro van. The vehicle, which he called home, had been running on fumes. He was hungry, and he needed more money; that was why he had driven to Blood Mountain. Although it was against park rules to camp in the parking lot, Hilton had managed to get